A weblog for students engaged in doctoral studies in the field of human rights. It is intended to provide information about contemporary developments, references to new publications and material of a practical nature.

Wednesday, 23 November 2016

The 13th Annual Conference of the European Society of International Law will take place in Naples, Italy, on 7-9 September 2017. The conference will be hosted by the University of Naples Federico II, the oldest public university in the world.

The theme of the conference is ''Global Public Goods, Global Commons and Fundamental Values: The Responses of International Law''.

The Call for Papers is now open. Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31 January 2017.

TLJN Conference 2017 - Transnational Criminal Law in the Americas, 4-5 May 2017: Call for Papers

On May 4-5, 2017, the Transnational Law and Justice Network at the University of Windsor, Faculty of Law, invites academics, policy makers, NGOs, and individuals working on the ground to participate in a multidisciplinary regional dialogue about the most pressing transnational criminal law issues facing the Americas today.

• What are the most pressing transnational criminal law issues facing the Americas today and how are these issues evolving and shifting?

• Should greater emphasis be placed on regional responses to transnational criminal law and how should such regional responses be structured?

• What assumptions underlie the current legal regimes addressing transnational crime and do they adequately reflect the reality of transnational criminality today?

• How have globalization and technological advancements shifted the nature of transnational criminality and how should this inform the legal response?

• How do critical approaches to law inform questions of transnational criminal law?

Those interested in presenting at the conference are invited to apply by email to tljnconference2017@uwindsor.ca no later than January 20, 2017. Further information can be found on the conference website.

The Art of Balancing: The Role of Law in Reconciling Competing Interests

University College London Faculty of Laws is pleased to invite submissions for its 2017 Postgraduate and Early Careers Conference to be held on 30-31 March 2017, at University College London, London, UK.The conference is designed to provide current doctoral students and recent PhD graduates with a forum to present and discuss their work among academic peers from different backgrounds and legal disciplines. The conference aims to promote fruitful research collaboration between its participants, and to encourage their integration in a community of legal scholars.

The Conference theme is “The Role of Law in Reconciling Competing Interests”. Contemporary legal problems create the need to balance competing interests, values, rights, obligations, and freedoms. This Conference will explore the response of the law and legal actors to modern challenges, be it in the context of domestic law and national jurisdictions or in the framework of international law.

The increasing criticism against the fragmentation of legal fields have brought about the need to reconcile public, individual, and international interests. Additionally, the growing focus on States’ obligations to respect and protect human rights and freedoms has too led to a shift in the manner States conduct themselves both in the domestic and international arenas. Yet, given the ever increasing extent of international regulation and concomitant demands on limited financial, technical and human resources, it is not at all clear how these competing rights and obligations ought to be balanced. Furthermore, the mounting pressure on the States to ensure the security of their population brings about the debate over States’ ability to limit other rights and freedoms on behalf of security interests, legitimate as may be.

We welcome applications from current doctoral students, both in law and law-related disciplines, and from recent graduates of doctoral programs up to five years since the completion of their PhD. We encourage submissions engaging all disciplines of law. Selection will be based on the quality of the proposal, as well as its capacity to engage with other proposals in a collaborative dialogue.

Interested scholars should email an abstract of up to 750 words along with a short bio in no more than two paragraphs by25 December 2016 to the following address: PGC2017@ucl.ac.uk. Abstracts should reflect papers that have not been published nor submitted elsewhere for consideration for publication. Successful applicants will be selected by an Organizing Committee and notified no later than 15 January 2017.

Saturday, 27 August 2016

Last year, the organisation I worked for (the Institute for International Criminal Investigations in The Hague) was contracted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to develop a set of training materials based on their International Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Conflict. I'm glad to say that those training materials have finally been made available online. There are ten Powerpoint modules on relevant topics, along with guidance notes to indicate how the materials should be used, how to run the exercises and what specific expertise the trainers should have to be able to deliver the module successfully. Some of the modules are very specific to international criminal law, but some are more general and deal with issues like understanding and recognising sexual and gender-based violence, conducting interviews with vulnerable witnesses, planning investigation or documentation exercises and storing evidence safely. At the moment the materials are only available in English, but because they were designed to be used with the International Protocol they may be translated and made available in other languages at some point in the future. They are a very useful resource for anyone who is conducting trainings on this issue, and they would also be helpful to anyone researching the practicalities of how to improve standards of investigation and documentation in relation to sexual and gender-based crimes. The training materials are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/international-protocol-on-the-documentation-and-investigation-of-sexual-violence-in-conflict-training-materials. We have also produced specific guidelines on how to investigate or document sexual and gender-based violence committed against men and boys, which recognises some of the unique challenges and considerations of dealing with male victims of these types of crimes. Those guidelines are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidelines-for-investigating-conflict-related-sexual-and-gender-based-violence-against-men-and-boys.

Friday, 8 April 2016

Earlier this week, the second Kenyan case at the
International Criminal Court came to an end with the granting of a motion by
the two accused claiming that there is ‘no case to answer’. This is a pretty
standard concept in adversarial proceedings. When the prosecution concludes its
evidence and confirms that it has nothing further to add in order to make
evidence of guilt, it becomes the turn of the defence to call evidence. But
first the defence may contend that the evidence of the prosecution is insufficient to
provide the basis for a conviction. If it succeeds, it is in principle entitled to an acquittal on the charges.

In the Ruto and Sang decision, two of three judges
agree with the defence that the prosecution evidence is insufficient to
establish guilt. The decision is somewhat strange and perhaps even
unprecedented in international criminal law in that we have three separate
judgments by the three judges. Dissenting judge Carbuccia even claims ‘that the decision of the majority of the
Chamber contains insufficient reasoning, since Judge Eboe-Osuji and Judge Fremr
have both given separate reason’. But that is clearly wrong because Judge Eboe-Osuji and Judge Fremr agree that there is no case to answer. Furthermore, Judge
Eboe-Osuji, in his judgment, says he accepts Judge Fremr’s review of the facts.

The real
novelty in this decision is the remedy. According to Judge Eboe-Osuji, it is a ‘mistrial’.
Judge Fremr doesn’t use the word ‘mistrial’, and he says ‘I do not consider the
impact to have been of such a level so as to render the trial null and void’. But
he agrees with Judge Eboe-Osuji that it is ‘appropriate to leave open the
opportunity to re-prosecute the accused, should any new evidence that was not
available to the Prosecution at the time of the present case, warrant such a
course of action’.

The
consequence, then, is that the two majority judges agree that the prosecutor
has been unable to produce enough evidence to convict but that she should be
given a second chance. I suspect that the Prosecutor is very relieved to send
the end of the Kenya nightmare and that this will be the last we hear of the
situation. Were there ever an attempt to prosecute Ruto and Sang again, they
would have strong arguments to challenge the legality of the determination by
the majority.

This is the
first time that a ‘mistrial’ has been declared in international criminal law. It
is a term that is used in common law adversarial proceedings where juries are
present and where a trial is in effect aborted and the prosecution given the
chance to start anew. I am unaware of any examples of a mistrial outside the
context of a jury trial. Presumably if there were any, Judge Eboe-Osuji, who is
a meticulous and thorough researcher, as his many constructive and creative
opinions demonstrate, would have found them and cited them in his reasons.

The first problem
is that there is no notion of a ‘mistrial’ in the Rome Statute, the Rules of
Procedure and Evidence, the Regulations of the Court, and previous practice of
other international criminal tribunals. When prosecutors and defence counsel
have tried to argue that certain procedural mechanisms exist by virtue of
article 21, and in the absence of express provision in the Rome Statute, they
have met with rejection by the Appeals Chamber. Judge Eboe-Osuji’s contention
that this novel and hitherto unknown concept can be derived from article 64(2)
and the duty of a Trial Chamber to ensure a fair trial is not very convincing.
His case would be more compelling if he could find examples in national
practice for a ‘mistrial’ where the prosecution is unable to make out its case.

Suppose that
instead of making a ‘no case to answer’ motion, the defence had simply said it
had no evidence to call on its own behalf. In other words, the defence would
invite the Trial Chamber to issue a verdict based upon the prosecution’s
evidence without calling any of its own witnesses. The result would have to be
an acquittal. Why does this tactical decision by the defence put Ruto in a Sang
in a position that is inferior to the one that they would be in had their
counsel said they had no evidence to call?

Perhaps,
according to Judge Eboe-Osuji’s theory, the ‘mistrial’ would still be available
even at the verdict stage. But it seems extraordinary that a Trial Chamber
could decline to issue a verdict of guilty or not guilty and instead declare a ‘mistrial’,
thereby inviting the Prosecutor to try again. There is also a serious obstacle
to all of this in the Rome Statute itself. Article 20(1) states: ‘Except
as provided in this Statute, no person shall be tried before the Court withrespect to conduct which formed the
basis of crimes for which the person has beenconvicted or acquitted by the Court.’

Article 84 of the Rome Statute poses another obstacle. It allows a revision of a judgment of conviction in the event of new evidence being available. There is no similar procedure in the case of acquittal. Allowing the Prosecutor to get a second chance if new evidence comes available is not consistent with this provision and with the vision of the drafters of the Statute. Suppose, for example, that instead of evidence of interference with prosecution witnesses being available at the 'no case to answer' stage, as it is in Ruto in Sang, this only became available after an acquittal, would the Prosecutor be entitled to demand a new trial? This is simply not allowed by the Statute.

Judge Eboe-Osuji is quite right to be shocked at the evidence of interference with the
trial but his attempt to find an original remedy is troublesome. He is probably
right to see article 70 proceedings for offences against the administration of
justice to be an inadequate answer. But it cannot be ruled out that the ‘mistrial’
remedy may actually have the opposite effect. If a trial can be aborted in this
way because of interference with witnesses, is that not an invitation to those
who do not want justice to run its course? In this case, the defendant clearly
would prefer an acquittal to a second trial. But in many cases, the defendant
will prefer a second trial to the prospect of a conviction. Those who seek to
avoid a conviction have now been provided with a mechanism.

Perhaps at some point another Chamber or another court will have to interpret this judgment. It should be construed as holding that based upon all of the Prosecutor's evidence there is 'no case to answer' and that this is equivalent to an acquittal. That the majority judges attempt to reserve the right of the Prosecutor to start again is not provided for by the Rome Statute and is in fact forbidden by article 20(1). They have gone beyond their authority in so doing. Subject to an appeal by the Prosecutor, Ruto and Sang are 'not guilty'.

The
acquittal judgment of Vojislav Šešelj paints a
portrait of a man who might be described as ‘the Donald Trump of Serbia’. Some
readers of the blog may be frustrated to find only summaries of the judgment
and the dissent by Judge Lattanzi on the website of the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. In fact, the Judgment can be found on the
French site of the Tribunal, along with the 500-page Opinion concordante ofJudge Antonetti.

The trial itself
finished in mid-2012, some four years ago, but judgment was delayed when Judge
Fred Harhoff was recused in September 2013, only weeks before the Trial Chamber
was expected to issue its verdict. Judge Harhoff’s recusal resulted from a
motion filed by the defendant after Judge Harhoff’s infamous e-mail message to
Danish friends and colleagues that complained about a malaise at the Tribunal. The
President of the Chamber, Judge Antonetti, objected to the recusal of Judge
Harhoff.

Rather than
abort the trial and start again, the Tribunal decided to appoint a new judge
who was to familiarize himself with the trial materials and then participate in
the verdict. On 31 March 2016, Judge Antonetti and the new judge voted to acquit while Judge
Lattanzi dissented.

One puzzle in
the acquittal is the attitude of Judge Antonetti to the recusal of Judge
Harhoff, back in September 2013. We now know what could not have been known in 2013,
namely that Judge Antonetti favoured acquittal. Why
would he have fought to keep Judge Harhoff in the Chamber knowing that he would
vote with Judge Lattanzi to convict? After all, Judge Harhoff was recused because his impartiality was
challenged by the defendant. The judgment of recusal
states that Judge Harhoff had ‘a bias in favour of conviction’.

Judge Liu
dissented on that decision. He said that the majority had failed to take into
account Judge Harhoff's experience as a Judge of the Tribunal and a professor
of law. He said ‘had the Majority considered these circumstances, it would have
found that Judge Harhoff's statements do not demonstrate an appearance of bias
towards conviction of accused before the Tribunal as to overcome the
presumption of impartiality’.

With
hindsight, we can see that dissenting Judge Liu, who upheld the impartiality of
Judge Harhoff was correct. The two judges who voted to recuse Judge Harhoff
were wrong. So was the defendant, who made the mistake of filing his motion. By
the way, Vojislav Šešelj deserves some credit for eventually obtaining an
acquittal. He was ridiculed for defending himself. He didn’t even call
witnesses in his own defence, something that most experienced criminal lawyers
would denounce as a huge mistake. And he won an acquittal. But his challenge
aimed at recusing Judge Harhoff was a mistake.

How do we know that Judge Harhoff would have voted to
acquit? Today, the Oslo-based TOAEP released a policy brief by Fred Harhoff discussing
his recusal. Professor Harhoff
explains that he waited until the verdict before making this public statement.
In it, he writes:

However, I did
not even mention Šešelj’s name or make any reference to his person or his trial
in my letter because my concern was not about Šešelj or other politicians, but
about generals and the military establishments’ possible interest in
rais- ing the legal requirements for the conviction of generals. The Panel did
raise this issue in its Decision by referring to the fact that Šešelj was
charged, inter alia, with hav- ing “directed paramilitary forces”, but
his role was not comparable to the authority of a regular military com- mander
during combat. He was a politician who occasionally visited his paramilitary
volunteers at the front- line to boost their morale, but to the best of my
knowledge, he never engaged in tactical manoeuvres or combat con- trol on the
battle eld. My letter had nothing to do with Šešelj, nor was it particularly
concerned with Serbs as such (as claimed by Šešelj in his Motion).

…

I waited until
after the rendering of the Šešelj Trial Judgment on 31 March 2016 to publish
these thoughts. A pos- sible appeal may still reverse the Trial Chamber’s
acquit- tal. I regret the Decision to disqualify me from the Šešelj trial, not
only because I still believe that the Decision – for the reasons I have
explained above – was ill-founded, but also because my disquali cation and
replacement by an- other Judge caused a further and substantial delay of the
trial against the accused who had already been held in custody in The Hague for
more than ten years. Indeed, the Bench on which I sat in the Šešelj case was
just a couple of months away from rendering its judgment. The episode remains a
mystery to me.

Professor
Harhoff does not quite go so far as to say he was planning to vote to acquit, although
that seems obvious enough from his comments made public today.

But maybe it
is not such a mystery. We now understand better why Judge Antonetti was
opposed to his recusal in the report that he sent President Meron in early
September 2013. The only 'mystery' is the misjudgment by the other judges and those who supported the recusal of Judge Harhoff, including the defendant.

This episode provides a rare opportunity to assess how wrong conclusions about bias may be sometimes. Isolated statements and comments, taken out of context, can indeed raise concerns and lead to negative perceptions. The test is what the 'reasonable person' would apprehend. The saga of Šešelj and Harhoff should inform our 'reasonability' in such circumstances.

Fred Harhoff
was and always has been a fair-minded professional who would neither convict or
acquit an accused for improper reasons or out of bias. This wasn’t obvious
enough to the judges who voted to remove him. Nor did the defendant understand
this. If he had, he would have been a free man two and a half years ago.

Wednesday, 6 April 2016

Amnesty International today issued its 2016 report on
capital punishment. The thorough annual reports by Amnesty International have
been produced for many years. They enable comparisons to be made and trends to
be identified.

The ‘headline’ on Amnesty’s website is ‘Dramatic Rise In Executions’. It is a gloomy and discouraging message. I expect this story will run in the media around the world.

This may be a case of debating whether a glass is half empty
or half full. As the report indicates, the dramatic increase is due to three
countries: Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In 2014, the three accounted for
386 executions. In 2015, they were responsible for 1,451 executions. It is a
huge and terrifying increase. As Amnesty recognizes, these three states
generate 89% of the total executions on the planet (with the exception of
China, which Amnesty does not include in its statistics because nothing
official is available).

But there is another much more hopeful message in the
Amnesty data.

If the very peculiar and grotesque cases of Iran, Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia are excluded from the total, we actually see a rather stunning decline
in the death penalty throughout the world. I looked at Amnesty’s reports over
the past six years, calculating the total number of executions but without counting Iran,
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Here is the result

2010248

2011234

2012288

2013330

2014223

2015179

In other words, excluding those three very nasty countries,
the number of executions in the world has never been lower. The decline in 2015
is nothing if not dramatic. If we look at the average for the previous five
years, it is 264 executions per annum. The total of 179 for 2015 represents a drop
of more than 30% compared with the average for the previous five years. Wow!

Some of this might be explained by the shrinking subject matter. In effect, there are fewer countries that apply the death penalty today than there were in 2010. But the difference is not that great. In 2010, Amnesty said that 95 states had abolished the death penalty in law., and that 139 had abolished it in either law or in practice. This year, the total is 102 for those that have abolished it in law, and 140 for those that have abolished it in law or in practice. That might explain a slight reduction, but not a 30% drop. The conclusion must be that most of the States that retain the death penalty actually use it significantly less than they did at the beginning of the decade.

China is excluded, of course. Since 2010, Amnesty has
not even attempted to guess at the number of executions in China. It is
probably several thousand per annum. Our information on China is entirely
anecdotal, but it seems consistent with the general trend rather than with that of the three anomalous countries. There can be little doubt that China has greatly
reduced its resort to capital punishment in recent years.

Sunday, 27 March 2016

The
Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland Galway is
pleased to announce that the annual International Criminal Court Summer School
will take place from 27 June – 1 July.

The International
Criminal Court Summer School 2016

27 June – 1 July
2016, NUI Galway, Ireland

The
annual International Criminal Court Summer School at the Irish Centre for Human
Rights is the premier summer school specialising on the International Criminal
Court. The summer school allows participants the opportunity to attend a series
of intensive lectures over five days. The lectures are given by leading
academics on the subject as well as by legal professionals working at the
International Criminal Court. The interactive and stimulating course is particularly
suited to postgraduate students, legal professionals, scholars, and NGO workers.
Participants are provided with a detailed working knowledge of the
establishment of the Court, its structures and operations, and the applicable
law. Lectures also speak to related issues in international criminal law,
including: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, the crime of
aggression, jurisdiction, fair trial rights, and the rules of procedure and
evidence.

This
year’s ICC Summer School will include a special session on victims at the International Criminal Court.

The
list of speakers at the 2016 ICC Summer School includes the following:

An
early bird registration fee of €400 is available for delegates who register
before 15 April 2016, with the fee for registrations after that date being
€450. The registration fee includes all course materials, all lunches and
refreshments, a social activity and a closing dinner. A limited number of
scholarships are also available. Please see the General Information section of
our website for further information.

Friday, 25 March 2016

Alongside yesterday’s very important judgment of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was a rather more
pathetic manifestation of the fight against impunity. While the judgment was
being issued, Security officials of the Tribunal, with the apparent assistance
of the Dutch police, arrested French journalist Florence Hartmann. She is now
in detention at the Tribunal’s prison. For a photo of her arrest, look here.

Florence Hartmann served as press officer at the Tribunal
about a decade ago, When she left, she published a memoir entitled Paix et châtiment. The book
referred to decisions of the Tribunal’s Appeals Chamber that were supposed to
have remained confidential. After being tried and convicted of contempt of
court, she was sentenced to pay a €7,000 fine. When she failed to pay the fine, the Tribunal converted the
sentence into one of seven days’ imprisonment. She now has six more days to go, that is, unless the Tribunal applies its policy of early release after service of two-thirds of the sentence.

All of the international tribunals have wasted a lot of
resources on prosecuting so-called ‘offences against the administration of
justice’. The time and money these matters have consumed could have been
usefully devoted to more serious cases involving genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

It doesn't have to be this way. In the early 1990s, the International
Law Commission conceived of an international court that would not concern
itself with issues like contempt of court, perjury and tampering with witnesses, leaving thus to the national courts. If Florence
Hartmann, or the others, really committed an offence against the administration
of justice, it would make a lot more sense for them to be dealt with by domestic justice systems.

If this were the case, by the way, the door would be wide open
to the European Court of Human Rights. It could address the human rights issues
that arise including arbitrary detention, imprisonment for debt, and freedom of
expression. But the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
lives in a little glass bubble where it is immune from supervision by the
European Court of Human Rights.

Florence Hartmann’s arrest did not, apparently, take place
on the territory of the Tribunal, but well outside its gates. Can it really be
the case that United Nations security guards have the legal authority to arrest
individuals on Dutch territory outside the premises of the Tribunal?

The Security Council resolution establishing the Tribunal
gives it jurisdiction over ‘serious violations of international humanitarian
law’. Publishing a book in France does not fit within this concept. That may
explain why France has refused requests from the Tribunal to arrest Florence
Hartman for non-payment of the €7,000
fine.

Nobody
should be put in prison for failure to pay a fine. This amounts to arbitrary detention.
If the offence merits a jail sentence, then impose one from the beginning. But if it only justifies a fine of a relatively modest amount, it should not then be converted into jail time for non-payment, If the Tribunal wants to collect the money, let it file a civil claim before a
national court and attempt to seize the money from the bank account of its
debtor. That’s what the rest of us have to do when we are owed money.

Thursday, 24 March 2016

Today,
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) will issue
its judgment in the case of one of its most high-profile defendants, former
Republika Srpska President Radovan
Karadžić. When the ICTY was established, the Secretary-General of the
United Nations noted
that it was ‘axiomatic’ that those tried by the international tribunal would be
tried in accordance with the highest international fair trial standards. The
Karadžić case highlights just how challenging it is for the ICTY (and other international
criminal tribunals like it) to ensure a fair trial in practice.

One
of the issues that has blighted the Karadžić trial throughout its lifetime has
been the non-disclosure by the prosecution of exculpatory materials by the
Prosecution. Under Rule 68 of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence, the
Prosecution is bound to disclose to the Defence any material in its possession that
may suggest the innocence of the accused, affect the credibility of Prosecution
evidence, or mitigate the guilt of the accused. As recently as last week, pursuant
to Karadžić’s 107th disclosure violation motion, the Trial Chamber found that
the Prosecution had failed to disclose relevant evidence, but (as with its many
previous findings of disclosure violations), found that no prejudice had been
suffered by the accused and therefore declined to grant any remedies for this
breach. Just yesterday, on the eve of the judgment, Karadžić’s legal advisor,
Peter Robinson, reported that
the defence had just received over 200 further pages of exculpatory evidence
from the prosecution.

In a
sense, the prosecution’s continued failure in fulfilling its disclosure
obligations is unsurprising, given the sheer volume of the case. Over the
course of the four-year trial, the testimony of 586 witnesses was received. Many
of these witness statements were admitted in written form, with limited or no
opportunity for cross-examination. Over 11,000 exhibits (totalling almost
150,000 pages) were received, and the transcript of the proceedings to date
exceeds 45,000 pages. The prosecution has disclosed over 2 million pages of
evidence. Moreover, the Tribunal has made extensive use of judicial notice of
adjudicated facts – including, as I note in my
book, such important facts as that Serb forces removed non-Serbs from
certain areas, that these forces mistreated detainees in detention facilities,
and that attacks were carried out on certain regions.

Karadžić
has represented himself throughout the trial, assisted by a small team of
support staff. While the Tribunal did overturn some of the Registry’s more restrictive decisions
on the funding of Karadžić’s defence team, and did grant him additional
time to prepare for trial, the defence team’s David has faced a
prosecutorial Goliath. Most recently, the President of the Mechanism for the
International Criminal Tribunals notified
the UN Security Council that a prosecution team had been established to prepare
for the anticipated appeal of Karadžić’s case. When Karadžić asked for funding
to resource an equivalent defence team, his motion was denied
as ‘purely speculative’ as there was no guarantee that the judgment would be
appealed, despite the clear implications on the equality of arms before the Tribunal.

Why should
it matter that such high-profile accused persons get a fair trial? Aside from
the fact that the Tribunals have already declared their procedures to reflect
the highest standards of fairness, and that any derogations from fair trial practices
may be utilised by domestic criminal justice systems as justification for their
own shortcomings, the impact of fairness on the legitimacy and legacy of the
Tribunals cannot be understated. Anything less than scrupulous protection of
the rights of the accused allow the Tribunals’ detractors to declare their
proceedings ‘show trials’, rigged against the defendants from the outset. With
the stakes so high, and the cost of international justice so enormous, nothing
less than the fairest of procedures will do.

The Editorial Team

W. Schabas, Y. McDermott, J. Powderly, N. Hayes

William A. Schabas is professor of international law at Middlesex University in London. He is also professor of international criminal law and human rights at Leiden University, emeritus professor human rights law at the Irish Centre for Human Rights of the National University of Ireland Galway, and an honorary professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing and Wuhan University. He is the author of more than 20 books and 300 journal articles, on such subjects as the abolition of capital punishment, genocide and the international criminal tribunals. Professor Schabas was a member of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Technical Cooperation in Human Rights and president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He serves as president of the Irish Branch of the International Law Association chair of the Institute for International Criminal Investigation. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Here is the full c.v.

Dr YvonneMcDermott is Senior Lecturer in Law at Bangor University, UK, where she is also Director of Teaching and Learning and Co-Director of the Bangor Centre for International Law. Yvonne is a graduate of the National University of Ireland, Galway (B. Corp. Law, LL.B.), Leiden University (LL.M. cum laude) and the Irish Centre for Human Rights (Ph.D.). Her research focuses on fair trial rights, international criminal procedure and international criminal law. She is the author of Fairness in International Criminal Trials (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Niamh Hayes has been the Head of Office for the Institute for International Criminal Investigations (IICI) in The Hague since September 2012. She is about to complete her Ph.D. on the investigation and prosecution of sexual violence by international criminal tribunals at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway. She previously worked for Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice as a legal consultant, and as an intern for the defence at the ICTY in the Karadzic case. She has lectured on international criminal law and international law at Trinity College Dublin and, along with Prof. William Schabas and Dr. Yvonne McDermott, is a co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to International Criminal Law: Critical Perspectives (Ashgate, 2013). She is the author of over 45 case reports for the Oxford Reports on International Criminal Law and has published numerous articles and book chapters on the investigation and prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence as international crimes.

Joseph Powderly is Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University. Between September 2008 and January 2010, he was a Doctoral Fellow/Researcher at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, where he worked, among other projects, on a Irish Government-funded investigation and report into the possible perpetration of crimes against humanity against the Rohingya people of North Rakhine State, Burma/Myanmar. He is currently in the process of completing his doctoral research which looks at the impact of theories of judicial interpretation on the development of international criminal and international humanitarian law. The central thesis aims to identify and analyze the potential emergence of a specific theory of interpretation within the sphere of judicial creativity. Along with Dr. Shane Darcy of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, he is co-editor of and contributor to the edited collection Judicial Creativity in International Criminal Tribunals which was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. He has written over 80 case-reports for the Oxford Reports on International Criminal Law, as well as numerous book chapters and academic articles on topics ranging from the principle of complementarity to Irish involvement in the drafting of the Geneva Conventions. In December 2010, he was appointed Managing Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Criminal Law Forum. His research interests while focusing on international criminal and international humanitarian law also include topics such as the history of international law and freedom of expression.

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Interested in PhD studies in human rights?

Students interested in pursuing a doctorate in the field of human rights are encouraged to explore the possibility of working at Middlesex University under the supervision of Professor William A. Schabas and his colleagues. For inquiries, write to: w.schabas@mdx.ac.uk.